


A Prayer Among the Ruins

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Confessions, F/M, First Kiss, Kind of Hurt/Comfort, Post-Time Skip, directly post-Myrddin, kind of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26824318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: Mercedes knows the cathedral is no longer a safe place to linger. She's long learned that cathedrals are not the only place one can pray. But after the battle at the Bridge of Myrddin, she ventures into the cathedral once more.Written for Mercedue Week 2020!
Relationships: Mercedes von Martritz/Dedue Molinaro
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	A Prayer Among the Ruins

**Author's Note:**

> I think that Pagan Goddess statue is super cool and I think the cathedral should have one but I don't think it does? Just a side room of saint statues. So I added a goddess statue, hope you don't mind.

The statue of the goddess had long been gone from the cathedral, but Mercedes could see it when she closed her eyes. Selfishly, she sometimes thought of it as her own vision from the goddess, a personal reminder that she still watched over her – over all of Fódlan, even when Mercedes could not see her. Since the war had begun, Mercedes had learned that you did not need to be in the cathedral to pray. She prayed in the infirmary, bringing soldiers back from the brink of death. She prayed on the battlefield as she watched them fall before she could save them. She prayed in the tiny moments that barely exist, until you add them together and they end up being most of your day. So she didn’t need the goddess statue, in order to pray. She just liked that the goddess had given her a vision. She liked that she could remember, when she had something special to pray for.

She had much to pray for that evening. It was the same set of prayers that had lived on her tongue all week, but she hadn’t ventured into the cathedral. She’d tried once, and Felix had chased her away, scolding her for her foolishness – to wander alone, at this time of night, in this place. Still, the prayers wouldn’t leave her tongue, no matter how she repeated them. So she chanced it, wandering down the echoing aisle past the empty pews, until she stood looking up to where the altar to the goddess used to be. And she prayed.

She had prayers of mourning, and of rest, for the soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield. She prayed for both her allies and her enemies. She always did this. More and more, however, it wasn’t theoretical. In the last battle, she had looked into the eyes of her enemies and realized they had once been her friends.

She had prayers of thanks, for those that survived. Every time she looked across the caravans returning home, and saw those she loved, it was a shock. She never quite believed they would survive.

She prayed for forgiveness, because she never quite believed.

Felix had called her reckless, when he chased her out of the cathedral that week. He had said she was careless. And perhaps he was right. If she had been more careful, more attentive to the world and less attentive to a statue that was no longer there, she might have heard the footsteps before they were directly upon her. Instead, it took her by surprise.

“She can’t hear you.” the voice itself seemed to tower above her. Mercedes opened her eyes. “And if she can, she won’t listen. All these years of prayer and you’ve never noticed that?”

“Good evening, Dimitri,” Mercedes said pleasantly. She looked up at him. His frame towered above her even more than his voice. “Would you like to pray together tonight?”

Dimitri scoffed. “Unhearing fool,” he muttered, looking away, towards the pile of rubble. Mercedes wondered, ruefully, whether he had the same visions of the destroyed statue that she did.

That was usually it. He said something scathing, she was kind where she could be, he wandered away. He never seemed to think of Mercedes as more than another ghost; no one around him ever seemed permanent. Mercedes closed her eyes and began another prayer, one of thanks, for bringing life back when she had lost all hope.

When he grabbed her arm, it was sudden and jarring. Because she had been praying. Because she had expected him to walk away. Because it had been a long time since someone had grasped her so violently.

“Who do you pray for?” he asked her, and Mercedes couldn’t help it, she tried to twist away.

“Our s-soldiders, Your Highness,” she gasped out, wincing as his fingers dug into her arm. “Our allies. My loved ones. You.”

“Do you pray for the dead?” he demanded, pulling her closer.

“Yes – of course I do,” Mercedes said. She was on her tiptoes now, and she wanted to step back but stepping closer alleviated the pull at her arm, and she wanted so much for there to be less pressure on her arm. “I say many prayers for the – for the fallen and the gone. If you would like, I can teach you one –”

“They can’t hear you,” Dimitri cut her off. He grabbed her other arm, and Mercedes’s feet were no longer touching the ground. “The goddess won’t listen and the dead cannot. From whom do you pray, then?”

“Dimitri,” Mercedes whispered. “You’re hurting me.”

“What do you pray for?”

“Please –”

For the second time that day Mercedes was careless, unthinking. She didn’t hear the footsteps approaching, although they must have been heavy, and fast. She didn’t know how Dimitri came to let her go, letting her collapse into the front pew. She saw the hands appear around his, and then he was away from her, and she was curling herself away from him, her arms aching as she tucked them against herself.

“Your Highness, you mustn’t –” the voice was reduced to a rumble in Mercedes ears, contrasted against the high pitch ringing that she couldn’t block out. Dedue was taller than she remembered, taller than she pictured when she closed her eyes. For a moment she thought she’d imagined him, and he was another one of Dimitri’s ghosts. As if she hadn’t been saying a specific prayer of thanks for his return every day since they’d returned from Myrddin. As if he wasn’t the reason she had come to the cathedral in the first place, to thank the goddess personally for bringing him back from the dead.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Dedue said, and Mercedes flinched to be chastised again until she realized he wasn’t speaking to her. He held Dimitri by the shoulders, held at an arm’s length, far away from her. “Your highness, it’s late. This is not the place for you, tonight.”

“I don’t understand,” Dimitri said, looking up at Dedue. Such a strange thing, to see Dimitri looking upwards. “I don’t understand how you’re not dead.”

He wrenched himself out of Dedue’s grasp and stalked across the cathedral, disappearing into shadows and darkness.

Mercedes stared at the pile of rubble at the front of the church, trying to visualize the statue of the goddess, until she realized hands were in front of her. She followed them upwards, leaning back, until she looked up into Dedue’s calm, concerned eyes.

“You need to go,” he said solemnly. And then, “Can you walk?”

She found his hands easily, but his eyes stayed concerned. He was the first to look away, pulling her to her feet, leading her away, one arm draped around her as protectively as any shield. If she’d been looking to the goddess instead of him, she would not have noticed how he searched the corners of the cathedral for his liege, looking for him even as they passed through the large wooden doors and out into the cold night air.

Mercedes took a long, steadying breath, the air rushing into her lungs, fresh and cold and reminding her that she was still alive. Dedue, possibly mistaking it for a shudder, dropped his arm and stepped away. He stared over the bridge into the night, and Mercedes wondered what he was looking at. He turned back to her, suddenly, before she could ask.

“They told me it wasn’t safe to leave him alone,” he said. His voice betrayed nothing. His face could have been carved out of stone. Mercedes knew; some of her best friends had faces that were carved out of stone. “I should have listened. I should not have let him near you. He is so – things are so different than what I hoped.”

“We used to have a guard,” Mercedes said, thinking back to the awful first few months, when Dimitri didn’t even hold conversations and just spoke in riddles. “Eventually we found it was easier to just avoid him. He doesn’t wander. But I –” she paused. She tried to think of a reason that she wasn’t careless. “I thought it would be safe, to pray, tonight,” she said finally, and she did sound careless, and it hurt to say it.

Mercedes looked away, over the bridge into the darkness. She realized she was keeping Dedue. He was too kind to leave her standing alone, but he undoubtedly had things to do other than standing on a bridge staring at nothing. She was forming the words to bid him a proper goodnight when she felt his hand on her arm. She looked up, waiting for him to speak, instead.

His hands were larger than Dimitri’s, but softer – or, if not softer, then more gentle. His fingers brushed across exactly where Dimitri had grabbed her, although Mercedes was unsure how he could judge that, given that any bruises were covered by her sleeves. She bit back a wince as his hand wrapped around her, but he held her arm gently, thoughtfully, like he was nurturing a greenhouse flower.

“We should go to the infirmary,” Dedue said, slowly running a thumb across the edge of her sleeve. “I can take you there.”

Mercedes felt her smile was genuine. She reached with her other hand and grasped Dedue’s hand, although her entire hand barely managed to cover his fingers. “I’ll be fine, Dedue. I’ve weathered worse and survived just fine. If my arm still hurts tomorrow, I’ll ask Annie to look at it.”

“Still?” Dedue asked, glancing sharply towards her. “Mercedes, please. If you’re hurt. If – if he _hurt_ you,” Dedue sighed, stopping mid-sentence. He dropped his hand, and Mercedes missed the gentle pressure. Dedue leaned out over the wall of the bridge again, standing silently for a few moments. “I don’t know how I’ll live with myself,” he said softly, not looking at her.

“What a thing to say!” Mercedes said. She closed the gap between them, taking him by he arm in a strange, two-handed repetition of how he’d grasped her moments before. “Dedue, it was my fault for going to the cathedral alone. If I had gotten more hurt, no one would have blamed you. It was my decision.”

“More,” muttered Dedue, and he didn’t look at her and he didn’t pull away. Mercedes waited, and when he spoke, it was as if there had been no silence between them. “I don’t worry for you, Mercedes. I worry for myself. I worry for how I’ve failed.”

“You haven’t failed! Look, here I am, just as I’ve always been,” Mercedes said, pulling his arm slightly. She wasn’t sure why she so badly wanted him to look at her. Maybe because she couldn’t stop looking at him. Maybe because he looked uncertain, and he was never uncertain, and she had been careless.

Dedue took a breath, his eyes closed, the fresh air filling his lungs as it had filled Mercedes’s. “I have sworn my life to protect his highness,” he said finally. “For five years, it was all I lived for. It was all I dreamed of. And yet, tonight, I cared not for his safety. Not when you were hurting. In that moment, five years of waiting, a lifetime of allegiance – it was all meaningless.”

“But Dedue,” Mercedes said, her cheeks flushing. “You did keep him safe. You kept us both safe.”

“I do not care,” Dedue said. He turned towards her again, running his hand down her arm. “I did not care when I ran at him, and I do not care now. What does that make me? I have failed, and I keep failing.”

Mercedes didn’t know how to answer. She had the same guilt, in her prayers, when she swore a life to the goddess and closed her eyes and saw someone else, stealing away her thoughts, her prayers dying on her lips. But her devotion was meaningless if she couldn’t share her life. Above all, she believed the goddess was one of forgiveness.

“The Dimitri you swore allegiance to, the one you’ve dreamed of while you’ve been away from us,” she said, looking up at Dedue. “He would be happy you’ve found people you care about enough to want to keep safe. He would not begrudge you for finding room in your heart to protect more just him. He would be happy for us, Dedue, don’t you think?”

She’d hoped he would smile, because she always hoped he would smile. He did not. But his eyes glinted as he looked down at her, and it was was. “Is it so obvious I care for you, then?” he asked softly, and her hands tightened around his arm, a shockwave running down her spine to hear him say it.

“Nothing about you is obvious, Dedue,” Mercedes said, truthfully. She slid a hand from his arm to his face, resting her fingers along his jawline, and he leaned down into it. “But there were times when that was what I prayed for.”

He raised an eyebrow at this. “Is that a customary prayer to offer to your goddess?” he asked, skeptical.

“No,” Mercedes admitted. “Sometimes I’ve failed, as well.”

There were prayers that Mercedes reserved for the goddess that had no form, and had no words. They were emotion only, of grief, of hope, of supplication. She left it to the goddess to sort out the meaning.

When Dedue leaned down and kissed her, stealing the cold night air from her lips and silently swearing a newly formed kind of devotion to her in exchange, she prayed a prayer like that to the goddess. One of perfect, selfish thankfulness, for his hands around her waist and his breath against her cheek and the unfathomable miracle that he had come back and he was in any way hers.

And if she was wrong for that prayer, she vowed, she would bring him along the next time she prayed for forgiveness.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly the timeline for this is probably a bit off because Grondor is in, like, two week, so presumably Dimitri is about to have a reeeeeal speedy recovery. But hey! It was the story I wanted to write, so it's whatcha get.
> 
> I feel like Dedue would have a hard time after Myrddin, regardless. To try to get back to someone for like 5 years and you show up and everything around you is just kind of destroyed . . . Dedue deserves better, overall. What a great dude.
> 
> [ Catch me on twitter for more Mercedue content this week. ](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes) Happy Mercedue Week, all!


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